Wow. "One crazy idea that the team had at that dinner was to translate Android's source code to C#. Android would benefit from C# performance features like structures, P/Invoke, real generics and our more mature runtime. [...] We decided it was crazy enough to try. So we started a small skunkworks project with the goal of doing a machine translation of Android from Java to C#. We called this project XobotOS." Most of Android's layouts and controls are now in C#. The small benchmark is stunning, but as much as I admire the work, I'm wondering that this like going from bad to worse - from Oracle's Java to Microsoft's C#.

I'm disappointed that they didn't translate it into Vala which would ditch the VM, but it could be that their work proved the possibilities and moved that forward. Vala is pretty similar to C#.

Only superficially. The language syntax is similar, yes, but that's where it ends. The runtime environments are completely different, and it's the similarity of the Java and .NET runtime environments that makes things like this possible.